To what extent did the recent passing of the anti-gay marriage law in California have to do with black homophobia? Here's a hornet's nest of a question. But as California voters turned out to choose their next president they also got the opportunity to vote for or against gay marriage. Surprisingly perhaps – after all this is California – they voted for the ban: 52 % voted for it, 48 % against.

One of the explanations for this is that black voters turned out in their droves to vote for Barack Obama and that black voters went 2 to 1 against gay marriage. So, does this enable us to speak of black homophobia?

The problem here is that this can too easily make it sound as if black people were responsible for this nasty law when, actually, the majority of people who voted for it were white. And while I am delighted that the Episcopal Church campaigned strongly for gay marriage, too many churches joined in the chorus against gay marriage, spreading the idea that, in some way, gay marriage threatens straight marriage.

That is clearly rubbish. The false witness of the churches, and of the black churches no less, may well be the real issue here. Consider the Rev Gregory Daniels, a pastor from Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago, who has proudly declared he would ride with the Klu Klux Klan if they were to oppose same-sex marriage.

Barack Obama has suggested that the black religious community must take more responsibility for tackling its own homophobia. Earlier this year, preaching at Martin Luther King's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, he said: "If we are honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King's vision of a beloved community," he told 2,000 applauding worshippers. "We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them."

Taking his scriptural text from Joshua, Chapter 6, the story of the walls of Jericho, the now president elect emphasised that although the walls were too strong to be breached by sheer force, God's plan was that if his people would stand together and march together and, at the sound of the ram's horn, speak with one voice, then the walls would fall. In other words, there needs to be greater solidarity amongst people that have experienced discrimination.

He went on to suggest that it's just this sort of unity that is required to overcome the "moral deficit" – which he glossed as an "empathy deficit" – that bedevils American society.

Earlier this week, Catherine Lhamon, the racial justice director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, powerfully made a connected point.

"My parents married in Washington, DC, rather than in Virginia, where my mother was raised, because in 1966 Virginia still outlawed interracial marriage. My mother, who is black, could not at that time marry my father, who is white, in her home state.

The United States Supreme Court outlawed race-based marriage restrictions the following year in Loving vs Virginia. I was raised in the shadow of Supreme Court decisions like Loving, and like Brown, that held that equal protection applies to all persons, and that promised a new day of meaningful opportunity for people like me.

If an electorate can, through the tyranny of the majority vote, wipe away such fundamental constitutional protections as the right to equal protection for all persons, then we as a state are returning to the bad old days of institutionalised discrimination that I never thought I would see in my lifetime."

The churches must be recalled to truth and justice. As one upper-crust New York woman says to another in a US newspaper cartoon I saw recently: "It's not the gays that are threatening my marriage. It's the straight women that are sleeping with my husband."